take half: if there is one hundred pounds,
take half: if there is five hundred pounds,
take half."

"No, no; Mr. F., I don't do business in
that way, I shall be satisfied with ten per
cent."

It was so settled. I then led him out into
the street, impelled to tell him the news, yet
dreading the effect; not daring to make the
revelation in my office, for fear of a scene.

I began hesitatingly, "Mr. Fitz-Roy I am
happy to say that I find you are entitled to
. . . . . ten thousand pounds!"

"Ten thousand pounds!" he echoed. "Ten
thousand pounds!" he shrieked. "Ten
thousand pounds!" he yelled; seizing my arm
violently. "You are a brick,—Here, cab!
cab!" Several drove up—the shout might
have been heard a mile off. He jumped in the
first.

"Where to?" said the driver.

"To a tailor's, you rascal!"

"Ten thousand pounds! ha, ha, ha!" he
repeated hysterically, when in the cab; and
every moment grasping my arm. Presently
he subsided, looked me straight in the face,
and muttered with agonising fervour, "What
a jolly brick you are!"

The tailor, the hosier, the bootmaker, the
hair-dresser, were in turn visited by this poor
pagan of externals. As by degrees under
their hands he emerged from the beggar to
the gentleman, his spirits rose; his eyes
brightened; he walked erect, but always
nervously grasping my arm; fearing,
apparently, to lose sight of me for a moment,
lest his fortune should vanish with me. The
impatient pride with which he gave his
orders to the astonished tradesman for the
finest and best of everything, and the amazed
air of the fashionable hairdresser when he
presented his matted locks and stubble chin,
to be "cut and shaved," may be acted—it
cannot be described.

By the time the external transformation
was complete, and I sat down in a Café in the
Haymarket opposite a haggard but handsome
thoroughbred-looking man, whose air, with
the exception of the wild eyes and deeply
browned face, did not differ from the stereotyped
men about town sitting around us, Mr.
Molinos Fitz-Roy had already almost forgotten
the past; he bullied the waiter, and criticised
the wine, as if he had done nothing else but
dine and drink and scold there all the days
of his life.

Once he wished to drink my health, and
would have proclaimed his whole story to
the coffee-room assembly, in a raving style.
When I left he almost wept in terror at the
idea of losing sight of me. But, allowing for
these ebullitions—the natural result of such a
whirl of events—he was wonderfully calm and
self-possessed.

The next day, his first care was to distribute
fifty pounds among his friends the cadgers,
at a house of call in Westminster, and
formally to dissolve his connection with them;
those present undertaking for the
"fraternity," that for the future he should never
be noticed by them in public or private.

I cannot follow his career much further.
Adversity had taught him nothing. He was
soon again surrounded by the well-bred
vampires who had forgotten him when penniless;
but they amused him, and that was
enough. The ten thousand pounds were
rapidly melting when he invited me to a grand
dinner at Richmond, which included a dozen
of the most agreeable, good-looking, well-
dressed dandies of London, interspersed with
a display of pretty butterfly bonnets. We
dined deliciously, and drank as men do of iced
wines in the dog-days—looking down from
Richmond Hill.

One of the pink bonnets crowned Fitz-Roy
with a wreath of flowers; he looked—less
the intellect—as handsome as Alcibiades.
Intensely excited and flushed, he rose with a
champagne glass in his hand to propose my
health.

The oratorical powers of his father had not
descended on him. Jerking out sentences by
spasms, at length he said, "I was a beggar—
I am a gentleman—thanks to this——"

Here he leaned on my shoulder heavily a
moment, and then fell back. We raised him,
loosened his neckcloth—

"Fainted!" said the ladies—

"Drunk!" said the gentlemen—

He was dead!

CHIPS.

FAMILY COLONISATION LOAN SOCIETY.

IF on any Saturday you should chance to
find your way to Charlton Crescent, an obscure
thoroughfare lying between the road from
Islington to Holloway and the New River,
not far from the Angel, you will see several
men and women dropping into a small house,
the parlour window of which contains a
printed bill with the above words. The
callers are chiefly of the decent mechanic
class, and not a few travellers from the
country,—pilgrims in search of truth about
emigration. Saturday is the day on which the
subscriptions of emigrants desiring to avail
themselves of the Family Colonisation Loan
Society are received.

And what is the Colonisation Loan Society?
The question is worth asking.

It is an association—devised by Mrs. Chisholm,
and to be speedily carried out
extensively with the aid of several philanthropists,
and the advice of two eminent actuaries—
for establishing a self-supporting system of
emigration, for assisting industrious people,
and for promoting practically the spread of
sound moral principles in a much neglected
colony.

Persons desirous of emigrating form
themselves into "groups," after being mutually